That One Thing
by JeanieBeanie33
Summary: She’d been staring into her glass, her eyes drooping because they weighed a ton and she wasn’t sure if it was really because of her makeup or not. That’s when she heard his voice.


Disclaimer: Don't own Secret Window – the book or the movie

**Disclaimer**: Don't own Secret Window – the book or the movie. That belongs to Stephen king and David Koepp and co. Ditto with _The Scarlet Letter_, which was written by Nathaniel Hawthorn.

The One Thing

She had had to read _The Scarlet Letter _in the eleventh grade, and she remembered taking the concept, adultery, into a modern-day context. She remembered asking herself how someone could do that to someone they had once pledged to love until the end.

She never thought that she'd understand why. She never thought that adultery would be why her marriage would end in divorce, and she certainly never thought that it would be _her_ who would commit the crime.

It had just been so _hard_, though. When she and Mort had first gotten married, it had seemed like a fairytale. When she came home after a hard day's work, he'd turn on the radio and turn until he reached a country station playing a song rather than an advertisement, and sing along to whatever the song was in an over-the-top performance until she laughed. He used to write little love poems in his chicken scratch and hide them places for her to find later: in her briefcase, in her glove compartment, in her coat pocket. And they were good too, not cheesy (at least, as not cheesy as a love poem could be), and so filled with love, and they made her feel so fucking beautiful.

Finally she'd gotten pregnant, after almost eight years of trying, and for two months, for two glorious months, they were _happy_. Ecstatic, giddy, overjoyed, etc. Mort was so proud and excited and so eager to please her every whim – he bought her flowers and rubbed her shoulders and stroked her hair and all sorts of other little nuances. He was smiling all the time then, and she couldn't help but smile too, because he looked so blissful and she glowed, _glowed_, to know it was she who caused it. Once, she'd been trying to tidy his desk while he made breakfast for her, and on the back of a worn-looking piece of paper was a list of names, some crossed out and some circled, divided into two columns: boy, and girl.

And she'd lost it – the baby. The happiness was gone, and, she realized later, although things got better after a while, it never really came back. Mort had retreated to the corners of his mind, perhaps where somewhere there was a little piece of paper floating around on it with names crossed out or circled, and a part of her knew that he never ever would tell her this, but she felt that he blamed her. She should've eaten better, she should've slept more, she shouldn't have walked so much – all these should-haves and could-haves, it's no small wonder that their house seemed so dark to the both of them.

Mort had gradually gotten over it, the disappointment that had clouded the both of them, and like always, she followed his lead. He smiled a little more – not as much as when they thought they'd finally bring a child into this world to share together – but he finally began to smile, and started humming while making her breakfast, kissed her and joked around with her – but the little poems never made reappeared. Neither did the singing. Neither did the ear-to-ear smiles and the shoulder-rubbing and the flowers.

But there were times when he would go back inside, when his eyes, the windows to his soul, would shut her out and he would go somewhere that she could never follow. He'd type away for hours on his laptop, sometimes, or stare out the window, moodily as the years went by, trying to regain what used to come easily, to feel inspired.

She'd try to get him to come to bed every now and then, so the bed wouldn't feel so cold, but more often than not he wouldn't. She'd try to get him to meet her for dinner, so that they could go somewhere new than the house haunted by all that could have been. One time it ended badly, very badly, where they were both screaming over the phone until she hung up on him saying to herself _'I don't need this right now, I don't need this right now, I really don't need this right now…._'

The night had only gotten worse, for Mort; because that was the night that Amy met Ted.

She'd gone to a bar, the first time in years, and the first time in over a decade without Mort. She'd been staring into her glass, her eyes drooping because they weighed a ton and she wasn't sure if it was really because of her makeup or not. That's when she heard his voice.

"You're the saddest-looking person in here," he'd said, sliding into the seat next to her. "You look like you could use someone to talk to right now."

"You got that right," she said quietly.

"Boyfriend troubles?" he'd asked, placing his drink on the table. His ring finger was bare, and looked like it had always been.

"No," she'd said. "Worse. Husband troubles." She tapped her ring-finger on the bar, the tapping sounding like the spoon Mort had knocked against a glass at their wedding reception, to make a toast to them, to the future….

His eyebrows had shot up. "Wow…you're married?"

"Yeah" was all she'd said. And she'd expected him to back off, like all the other men that had moseyed up to her at restaurants and bars and street corners and buses and even the elevator…then found someplace to be when they saw the ring with the small diamond.

But he hadn't. "I'm sorry," he said. "It's just…you really don't look like someone who could be married." She didn't bite his head off, like she had originally felt like doing to anyone who had disturbed her during her therapy session with her beloved vodka, because he sounded so honest and so sincere that she knew it wasn't meant to be taken as an insult.

He had gone on. "What could the guy who's lucky to have snagged you have done to make you have the blues like this? He should be catering to your every whim."

"He used to."

And it had grown from there, growing into a name – "I'm Amy, by the way," she said, tucking her hair behind her ears after laughing for the first time in a week. "I'm Ted," he said, with a warm ear-to-ear smile – and a number. As the months had gone by, the words had poured out, her troubles with Mort and the loneliness she felt and, yes, the baby. And she hadn't really felt like she was betraying Mort, because it wasn't like she loved Ted, right? She wasn't sleeping with Ted and she wasn't trying to. She just wanted someone to talk to, to see her side of it, someone who hadn't known her before, someone who she could start a clean slate with.

She was just waiting for Mort to come to his senses, was all. She was just waiting for his eyes to open up for good. Then she would stop going out with Ted so much and end up with love poems written in Ted's neat handwriting and tickets to see a play that she'd once said she always wanted to see (for some reason, conversations with Ted kept going on and on, because she started to never want them to end).

That's when she'd discovered the flaw, because she never intended to fall _out_ of love with Mort and fall _in_ love with Ted. She never intended to kiss him, which led to…quite more than a kiss, which led to a hotel room. And it wasn't the only time. Ted said he wanted them to tell Mort, because he was going to find out one day and it was best if he was told by them, rather than some other way. She'd kept putting it off, not really knowing why except maybe she was holding on to the hope that this would work itself out somehow, that she could still be married to Mort and _really_ be married to him, like before.

Then Mort had found them, one night, at the hotel room a couple miles from the bar where Ted and Amy had first met. She'd never felt so awful, but at the same time she was relieved because she didn't have to choose. Mort's eyes were dark, and sad, and angry, and he was screaming and waving a gun around, which scared her to hell because she didn't even know he owned a gun. But she didn't have to look into sweet Ted's eyes, Ted who had only ever sought to comfort her and help her, and see his heart break with a simple sweep of his eyes lowering from hers.

She didn't know which would have been worse if they had been compared: seeing Mort pack his clothes and grab his computer and stuffing a huge stack of papers she'd organized the morning before into a folder with shaking hands, and hauling all of it to his beaten-up old car, and climbing into the front seat after muttering something about their old lake house when she asked where he was going, and watching him drive away with a huge sense of finality washing over her…or seeing Ted walk away from her, his coat wrapped tightly around him, his hands jammed into his pockets, perhaps walking a little stiffly from compressed emotion, perhaps with shoulders hunched from a cold that was maybe imagined…and knowing that he was gone forever.

She didn't know, if given another chance, which she'd choose or even why she committed the one crime she never thought she'd be guilty of. And she was glad she'd never know, because looking back, she realized she had never _wanted_ to know.

© JeanieBeanie33


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